News

GSMAs much anticipated RCS Universal Profile

by Ray Flynn | 9th January 2017

Last November saw the publication of the much anticipated RCS Universal Profile specification by the GSMA. This Universal Profile, or UP as it’s fast becoming known, provides a merging of the at times, divergent RCS standards. As well as focusing on key features, it provides interesting new use cases around messaging for Enriched Voice Calling, with content sharing pre, during and post calls. For the most part, the UP standards build on the previously released Common Core and Blackbird standards for RCS.

The promise of the UP is that it will provide ubiquity to RCS much like we have already today for SMS and MMS. This will be key for the success of RCS and merges the standards from North America, Asia and Europe in particular. The UP also provides for the Green Button Promise for Voice and Video, which has been much needed since the rollout of VoLTE networks. There is also the inclusion of Plugins and UI Hooks, which is a gateway to Messaging as a Platform (MaaP) for third party developers on RCS. This for example provides the possibility of including payment gateways or common shopping lists in a group chat.

Openmind has already built our Traffic Control platform to comply with the RCS Common Core and Blackbird standards, so UP represents a natural progression in many ways. Indeed there is much commonality between the standards, particularly around messaging with the same standards applying to all cases. Group chat has been extended to 100 participants probably being one of the stand-out additions. The inclusion of MaaP in the standards is welcomed by Openmind as a key strategy for messaging. The APIs for RCS also provide a direct path for the A2P market to engage with consumers in a much more interactive way.

Overall there has been broad welcome to UP and it is certainly helping to reignite the interest in RCS. The UP standard strikes the right balance of offering a compelling user experience whilst sticking to the core foundations of RCS.

If you would like to learn more about how Openmind can help with your RCS strategy contact us today.